Grip
by Zaedah
Summary: When the dust settles, dust still remains.


**_Dedicated to the Real Zaedah, who ran off into that big open field of doggy heaven last night. Many thanks to my LiveJournal buddies (and you know who you are) who sent such kind well-wishes.  
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**_Please forgive any typos... _**

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**Grip**

It is said that when the dust settles, everything will be clear.

Olivia considers this a simplistic and impossible view. She remembers living in a world where life is shape-sorted into convenient adages. But this existence, the one she steps back into cautiously, fearfully, is like waking from a dark dream and finding the demons still perched on the foot board in the light of day.

When the dust settles, dust still remains, a gritty coating that hardens as it clings to her, them, this. And chokes the potential that was and won't be. She used to think she could walk away yet events have proven that wrong delights in following her. They twisted her sense of duty and with it, her peace.

The debris in the right world that she was not present to make mingles and breeds with the ruin in the wrong world that she is unable to shake.

In the crashing of an unwelcome mirror, Peter becomes the end of her torture and the source of it.

Nothing glimmers now, the power dying along with some crucial part of her spirit that she'd never bothered to access until now. What is missing is what she hadn't allowed time to nurture since there was always a tomorrow. It might have been called hope and the lack of it tastes like too many screams. But the responsibilities haven't abandoned her and she's never cared less for the strangers in her care.

Every case is a projection of her insides; rotted, disturbed, mutated.

**...…**

Her grip on the crumbling ledge slips more each day.

**...…**

Peter destroyed a universe and she's not convinced it was for her.

With a traitor's body and restored belief, she'd opened a portal while he'd opened a wound, imploding a fantasy land of dirigibles and hate that this side, for all its flaws, could never attain. Days pass and Peter's eyes have imploded too, having left the lesion open to feel the annihilation wrought by his own heart. They say he intended to save her, an act of love. But that still small voice declares hatred as the fuel.

The lessons taught from her history of self-persecution cannot deter him from the gallows he's crafting.

Sitting before the federal shrink, Olivia wonders which lie sounds more true; _I'm glad to be back _or_ I'm sorry they all died_. In her own time, she'll bury the dead that aided her, the resurrected friend and the brave driver. For now, there is but to mourn the guilt that Peter has chosen for insulation. In a reflection of their earliest days, she looks to him and yells for help without speaking; d_on't make me do this on my own._

The mental splinters born of captivity and subsequent release into a passing lie need attendance but the work doesn't wait for the collection of breath, the appeasing of doubts. Someone wore her face and reclaiming it makes it feels no less borrowed.

The blood on his hands is figurative and no less staining.

That an entire dimension of doppelgangers could not have survived the severing of the umbilical cord is both her fault and her reason. This is the cost of her life and it gives her lungs cause to continue the fruitless push to drink air. To die is to hand their ghosts victory.

Peter's doing enough of that for them both. She's returned to the world and lost the best thing in it.

**...…**

She's never been skilled at letting go.

**...…**

He outdistances her without moving.

In a shade of denial that colors her view, Olivia tried to believe that he grieved for the million he'd sentenced to death. The cutting of the thread was a power he had to summon from a deep place that frightened him. His other father knew this, built a machine around it. But it isn't the many.

It's the one.

The practiced liar won't forgive deception, which the other Olivia should have known. This Olivia has no right to lament the enormity of what isn't but that doesn't stop her from scratching her flesh to keep from reaching out. Long has she been the intangible one, the ruler of an empty kingdom where suitors arrive in a mist of the forbidden and depart as traitors.

But this shady knight has stripped off the armor and now lays bare, daily resuscitating agony too fresh to be covered. The price of her rescue is exacted in slow measure from a man who valued himself little to start with.

Peter sold his future for her present.

Whether it is the pain of condemning an intimate partner or the idea of killing a version of his original Olivia, she cannot tell. She will not ask, not until she must.

Finally it's a bowing to frustration that Olivia opens her mouth and it's a kneeling to misery that Peter answers. Not with words but a physical pleading which spills out in sobs and desperation for a forgiveness he shouldn't seek and will not find. It's a first for him, she thinks and her embrace is tight enough to strangle.

**...…**

She now knows how to hold on.


End file.
